The Measurable Benefits

In 1997, the National Center for Manufacturing Science (NCMS) commissioned a study of the best practices worldwide. In that study, to the surprise of many of the participants, they found that almost all the companies were doing essentially the same things (by different names) and were getting the same results (roughly where the red diamonds are below). In the following decade, companies have instituted numerous improvement efforts... and made notable improvements (to the blue diamonds)... but those pale in comparison to what's possible (the right side of each scale). How do we know it is possible to reach the right sides of the scales below?

That 1997 study did find one exception... one company that seemed to do everything distinctly different than the "best practices" that others were working towards... and with dramatically different results. The right side of those scales is where Toyota was in 1997... performance not even approached by the best of the best elsewhere.

The Success Assured™ methodology, inspired in part by the Toyota Product Development System, directly addresses all of the above performance measures by making the knowledge and the knowledge gaps visible very early, before decisions are made, such that those gaps can be filled prior to making those decisions, allowing the team to know early in the process that those decisions will lead to success. There will be no need for late-cycle rework... and thus no major schedule interruptions. By making their knowledge visible to product development, operations can ensure that the designs that come to them will satisfy their needs. And not only does that visible knowledge ensure success for the current project, the concrete usable form of that knowledge also makes it reusable on later projects.

Furthermore, that ever-growing knowledge is what has allowed Toyota to reduce development times despite increasing complexity, whereas other industries have only seen development times grow tremendously with that complexity. For example, DARPA has made that point to the aerospace & defense industry through the following graphic that shows how development times have been steadily increasing with complexity in that industry (the light blue line), in contrast to Toyota (the green line).

To achieve that, your knowledge and capability must be continuously improved as fast or faster than the complexity is growing. For more on that, see these topics: